2018 AIR AWARDS NOMINEE SPOTLIGHT - KING GIZZARD AND THE LIZARD WIZARD

Nominated in the BEST HARD ROCK, HEAVY OR PUNK ALBUM, is King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard for Murder of the Universe.

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard's sense of unfettered sonic exploration makes them easy to mistake for a long-forgotten relic of the psych explosion of the '60s. With a far-out sound that, at times, feels barely held together, King Gizzard evoke the eclectic rock experimentation of Frank Zappa's early work with the Mothers of Invention as they follow their musical flights of fancy wherever they might go, and let the rest just fall into place on its own. Their prolific nature led them to release albums at a frenetic pace; their intense desire to seek out new sounds and follow new paths meant that every one of their multitude of releases sounded different from the last.

After signing to ATO Records, their sound took a detour from expanded jams and fuzzy freakouts to tightly constructed, but still weird, laid-back pop songs played exclusively on acoustic instruments on the 2015 album Paper Mâché Dream Balloon. The follow-up , 2016's Nonagon Infinity, was recorded at Daptone Studios and featured some of the band's heaviest, most forceful psych-rock to date. It was recorded so that one track bleeds into the next, then jumps back to the beginning after the last song. They tout it as the "world's first infinitely looping album." The band spent time touring and getting five albums ready for release in 2017. On the first of them, Flying Microtonal Banana, King Gizzard decided to investigate microtonal tuning, a non-Western way of tuning that involves intervals smaller than a semitone. They had a custom-made guitar gifted to them, and the bandmembers bought new gear and altered the instruments so they could be microtuned in a way that made them compatible.

The group's second album of 2017, Murder of the Universe, arrived two months later in March. It was broken into three long sections, each one telling a different apocalyptic tale of the human race being taken over by cyborgs and AI, while featuring heavy use of synths and spoken word narration. Just before that album's release, the band finished a collaboration with Mild High Club's Alex Brettin, who traveled from L.A. to King Gizzard's Flightless HQ studios in East Brunswick, Melbourne, Australia, where he and Stu Mackenzie figured out some rough ideas. The duo was then joined by the rest of the band to fill those ideas in. Titled Sketches of Brunswick East, the album was a heady mix of soft rock, psych-pop, and cosmic jazz. It was released by ATO in August of 2017, mere months before their next record was released. The relatively straightforward (for King Gizzard) psychedelic opus Polygondwanaland was given away for free and the master tapes were offered to anyone who wanted to press the album up and sell it. ATO was one of the first to take advantage of this, and several other labels followed suit. Fulfilling the group's pledge to put out five albums in 2017, they snuck Gumboot Soup in just under the deadline. The collection of thematically and sonically unconnected songs, a rarity for the group, was issued digitally on December 31, then given a physical release in April of 2018.

All award winners will be announced this Thursday the 26th at the Queen's Theatre.